Trash train

Taking out the garbage is often a stinky chore. But for those in the waste management business, it smells like money and with fewer places to put it, the industry really has a chance to clean up.

Ever since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began its efforts to close landfills in 1990, Long Island municipalities have been struggling to find the best ways to dispose of the many millions of tons of trash generated here every year.

Though municipal waste is currently moved by trucks, new proposals to employ trains – touted as more efficient and environmentally friendly – could lead to a big payoff, eventually yielding operators as much as $100 million in annual revenue, according to industry estimates.

Currently, some of the Island’s municipal waste is trucked to incineration plants, where the burning process creates energy and ash. The ash is then trucked to one of two local landfills that still accept it – in Babylon or Brookhaven. Most of the area’s garbage, however, is compacted and taken off the Island in trucks, where it’s dumped at distant landfills in other states.

Garbage trucks queue up at the Town of Brookhaven’s Waste Management Facility on Horseblock Road in Yaphank.

Before it goes off to get burned or sent out of state, waste management firms turn trash into cash by sorting through the garbage and removing plastics, metals and other recyclables that can be sold. But the big money comes from transportation and disposal of the waste that’s left.

Tipping fees, the charge to dump solid waste in a landfill or have it burned in an incinerator, have been rising steadily. The average cost of tipping a ton of waste at a U.S. landfill increased to nearly $49 at the end of 2016, up 1.5 percent from 2015, according to a Solid Waste Environmental Excellence Protocol report. The highest tipping fees are found in the Northeast and run an average of $78 a ton, and they’re even higher on Long Island.

And getting the trash to a landfill or incinerator is also costly, with transporters charging between $40 and $45 a ton for the service. That’s why moving it by rail is more lucrative. While a single tractor-trailer truck can move some 24 tons of trash, one rail car can carry 100 tons.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation is currently weighing a proposal from Green Rail Transfer that would utilize the site of an asphalt plant on Furrows Road in Holtsville to transfer up to 900 tons of baled municipal solid waste a day from trucks to train cars that would take the garbage to Virginia landfills.

Michael Borgos, president of Queensbury, N.Y.-based Green Rail Transfer, says his firm began discussions about the waste-by-rail plan with the DEC in May 2012. Borgos said he evaluated all the rail spurs on the Island and chose the Holtsville site because of its centralized location and ample size. The existing rail spur at the site is currently used by Pav-Co for train deliveries of stone and other products used at its asphalt plant there.

“We can provide regular, reliable service,” Borgos said, adding that the company would likely charge less than $100 a ton for transporting and disposing the garbage.

Green Rail would utilize the services of New York & Atlantic Railway, which is the freight carrier that leases the use of the Long Island Rail Road’s track system. New York & Atlantic already transports construction and demolition waste by rail from transfer sites in Farmingdale (Tunnel Hill) and Lindenhurst, but it doesn’t currently take municipal waste from Long Island on its trains.

Though the Green Rail proposal is considered a “Research and Development and Demonstration” project by the DEC that would have a one-year trial period, it still faces an uphill battle. While the public comment period on the plan ended last week, the agency is reviewing that input before it decides to issue Green Rail a permit. But even if it clears that hurdle, it will likely need an approval from the Town of Islip for the Holtsville property’s change of use, and so far, Islip isn’t on board.

Equipment loads large bales of plastic-wrapped solid municipal waste into railroad cars in Green Rail’s 2013 test movement from Brentwood to a landfill in Pennsylvania.

“The supervisor and the Islip Town Board have written a letter to the DEC in opposition to this site being used as a transfer station,” said Islip spokeswoman Caroline Smith via email. She also said, “The Town of Islip has no interest in using the Green Rail facility to transfer its residential waste.”

Residents who live near the Furrows Road site have also expressed their opposition.

“It’s too close to a residential neighborhood,” said Don Urquhart, who has lived there for 22 years. “There would be a constant queue of tractor trailers spewing emissions.”

Urquhart and his neighbors have created a website and a Facebook page in an effort to stop the Furrows Road project. They are miffed that Green Rail is partnering with Railroad Realty, an entity formed by Pav-Co principals William and Ronald Fehr, on the trash-by-rail effort. Urquhart says that operations at the Fehrs’ site and adjacent parcels have included illegal dumping and sand mining, which has inundated the community with truck traffic and pollution.

LIBN uncovered the Furrows Road dumping activity in a July 2015 story and the DEC followed up by fining the Ciardullo Trust, owners of the property, and ordering the site’s remediation. The DEC assessed a penalty of $700,000, with $350,000 of it suspended, unless the owners fail to implement the cleanup.

Trucks that dumped at the Ciardullo site had to pass through the Fehrs’ complex to get in and out; however the connection, if any, between the owners of the properties was unclear. But a DEC spokesman told LIBN that the property owners held accountable for the illegal mining and dumping are not the same people seeking a permit for the transloading of waste from truck to railcar.

While the proposed truck-to-rail waste transloading facility at the Furrows Road site would certainly be profitable, a much bigger prize would be a trash-by-rail operation at or near the 529-acre Brookhaven landfill.

Currently, all of the 170,000 tons of residential municipal solid waste collected in Brookhaven each year is trucked to the Covanta incinerator in Westbury. About 370,000 tons of ash from three of Covanta’s four Long Island waste-to-energy incinerators – in East Northport, Ronkonkoma and Westbury – comes back by truck and gets dumped at the Brookhaven landfill annually, along with about 700,000 tons of processed construction and demolition debris.

Brookhaven says it nets $30 million of the $52 million in annual revenue generated by its landfill operations. However, town officials are aiming to close the dump in less than eight years, so there is a sense of urgency to find alternative solutions.

Winters Bros. Waste Systems, which along with Omni Recycling runs the single-stream recycling facility at the Brookhaven landfill, sees moving waste by rail in Long Island’s near future.

Pav-Co Asphalt plant property on Furrows Road in Holtsville is proposed site for truck-to-rail transloading facility to take municipal solid waste off Long Island.

“I think the biggest motivating factor is that truck transportation on Long Island is difficult,” said Will Flower, vice president of West Babylon-based Winters Bros. “Moving any material off of Long Island is extremely expensive and extremely costly because of the congestion. One of the reasons that we like rail so much is it takes trucks off the street and it also is better for the environment. There are less emissions per ton associated with rail movements.”

One of the biggest obstacles in moving solid waste off Long Island by rail has been opposition from Queens-based civic groups, specifically Civics United for Railroad Environmental Solutions (CURES). Many of the group’s members live near New York & Atlantic’s Glendale rail yard, where open-topped train cars filled with odiferous construction and demolition (C&D) debris often sit for hours, even days, while crews are changed and equipment is serviced.

To minimize their concerns, Borgos said the bales of waste are tightly wrapped in plastic to prevent leakage and the plan calls for hard covers on every train car to keep odor at a minimum and prevent any debris from blowing off. In addition, he said Green Rail would “make sure the cars have a positive hand-off” so that the trash train doesn’t sit too long in the rail yard.

Winters Bros., which has been moving trash by rail from its Danbury, Conn. facility to landfills in Ohio and Virginia for the last six years, wants to lead Long Island’s waste-by-rail movement.

“We know that C&D material and waste from metal shredders, also known as fluff, currently moves off of Long Island by rail every single day,” Flower said. “We’re carefully watching projects, such as Green Rail and Tunnel Hill and others, as they develop and we believe there’s a need for these projects plus others.”

Flower adds that “there are going to be some significant changes” in the way waste is handled once Brookhaven’s landfill is closed and preparations need to begin sooner than later.

“When you start thinking about rail movements, these are projects that aren’t built overnight,” Flower said. “And really what we’re talking about is building a necessary infrastructure for the long-term management of solid waste and when you look at these projects, they could be two-, three-, four-year projects and they need to start today.”